So what is Larry Agran spending park money on in the upcoming annual budget? According to internal Great Park records obtained by the Weekly, here’s a sampling, and recall, there is no park yet:
• Government consultants: $9,848,714
• Park board salaries and benefits: $4,019,225
• Entertainment (excluding the air balloon): $1,735,000
• Legal fees: $1,025,000
• Balloon PR rides: $928,751
• Visitor-center operations: $850,000
• Employee retirement perks: $577,368
• Park history project: $285,000
• Contingency for unknown spending need: $240,000
• Trailer relocation: $160,000
• New office furniture: $150,000
• Copying charges: $104,631
• Park office relocation: $100,000
• Irvine police protection: $100,000
• Out-of-town-conference travel: $55,000
• Carousel maintenance: $50,000
• Office supplies: $50,000
• Beepers to notify balloon riders it’s their turn: $30,000
• Staff overtime: $30,000
• Tree registration: $17,000
• Balloon-website maintenance: $15,000
• Postage: $15,000
• T-shirts: $9,000
Within that budget, Agran has set aside $200,000 for an agricultural consultant, $80,000 for a fund-raising consultant, $80,000 for an educational-program consultant, $90,000 for a park consultant, $125,000 for an arts and cultural consultant, $150,000 for a “strategic enterprises” consultant, $24,000 for a Sacramento lobbyist, $25,000 for an operational consultant, $280,000 for an aviation consultant, and $50,000 for an intellectual-property consultant. The board secretary makes $182,195. An office clerk makes $65,059. A part-time office clerk makes $44,661, while nine board members take their share of $110,705 from the park’s public kitty.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.